How Great Brands Came to Be
Speaking now of world-famous companies and brands, it is sometimes difficult to imagine that once their founders were inexperienced start-up entrepreneurs, global retail chains started from a single small shop, and large-scale production from small “home” factories. However, the great businessmen of our time were also once young startups that no one knew.
The stories of the birth of well-known brands are mostly interesting and instructive, and in some cases even inspiring for their own business achievements.
Roy Raymond, being a loving husband, decided to treat his wife with a gift – a new set of women’s underwear. Having gone to the store alone, Roy was simply confused among the huge number of options that the sellers offered him. Not many of them knew how to work with male customers, and Roy felt very uncomfortable in all this “feminine kingdom” of underwear. He never managed to pick up a gift, however, an idea arose in his head, which became fateful for Raymond. It was the idea of opening a women’s lingerie store, where both women and men would feel equally comfortable.
80 thousand dollars were needed to implement the idea. of this amount from friends, half from a bank at interest. The first Victoria’s Secret store was opened in a shopping center in Stanford. Women in such stores already feel like a fish in water, but sellers were trained separately to work with male buyers. This allowed all representatives of the stronger sex to feel as comfortable as possible in such a store. And yes, the idea shot in the first year of work. After a while, Victoria’s Secret goods began to be sold through catalogs, which brought Raymond huge incomes, and the brand – world fame.
How Great Brands Came to Be
KFC
Harland Sanders, the founder of the worldwide fast food chain KFC, started his great business journey quite late. Until his forties, he had practically no ambitions in terms of entrepreneurship. Having no education (except for the sixth grade of school), Harland worked as a fireman, and a conductor, and a laborer on a farm, and a tire seller. He did not stay long in any of these professions. Together with his wife, Harland lived rather poorly.
When he was forty years old, Sanders decided to open a small auto repair shop. The business went well, and after a while the entrepreneur added a small cafe on the territory of the auto repair shop to the main service. Sanders prepared meals for clients himself, and he was especially good at battered fried chicken. Very quickly, the fame of a delicious dish in a car workshop cafe spread to the entire settlement, and even beyond. Sanders cooked the chicken according to his own recipe, adding eleven different spices to it in a certain proportion.
The business did not develop as Sanders had expected, but it was nevertheless very successful: the bulk of the customers visited the workshop not to use auto services, but to taste Harland Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken. A few years later, Sanders opened the Sanders Court & Cafe hotel, on the territory of which he placed a restaurant. There he continued to serve his already famous fried chicken in batter, constantly improving the recipe. With the development of business, Colonel Sanders (this honorary title was given to him by Governor Lafon) began to open his restaurants throughout America, calling them KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken).
How Great Brands Came to Be
Read the success story of yet another fast food giant: Subway.
Pampers
Victor Mills, a specialist chemist at Procter & Gamble, has been blessed with three grandchildren by her daughter. The caring grandfather often looked after the kids and looked after them, but, like any person, he tried to simplify his troubles in many ways. When he got tired of changing his grandchildren’s diapers several times a day, washing dirty ones and changing them for clean ones, Mills came up with the idea: “Why wash when you can throw it away? However, you won’t get enough diapers like that … ”
A solution was found – to create a kind of pad from a material with a good ability to absorb liquid and attach it to the child’s shorts. Having created several options for his salvation from dirty diapers, Victor Mills first of all tested them on his own grandchildren. After several experiments, the most optimal and convenient implementation of this idea was found. By the way, Mills experimented not only on his grandchildren, but also on his wife and daughter. They helped him test the effectiveness of another of his inventions – toothpaste.
Victor Mills gave the world a product that could make life easier for many young parents, and the name of his trademark has long become a household name.